The Andalusi nūba

node · earth · Maghreb — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya

The suite tradition developed in al-Andalus between roughly the ninth and fifteenth centuries and surviving today not in Spain but across the Maghreb, under three regional names: ala in Morocco, ṣanʿa in Algeria and maʾlūf in Tunisia and Libya. A nūba is an ordered sequence of movements in a single mode, its sections running through fixed rhythmic cycles, sung to Andalusi strophic poetry — the muwashshaḥ and the zajal — with the ʿūd among its core instruments. Its history is the reason it belongs in a Journey about movement rather than a Journey about Spain. The conquest of Granada in 1492 and the expulsions that followed drove Andalusi Muslim and Jewish families, including its musicians, across the strait; the repertoire was carried to Fez, Tlemcen, Algiers, Tunis and elsewhere and maintained there by oral transmission and by songbooks, while in Iberia itself the institutional tradition ended. Jewish communities of the Maghreb, notably in the mellah of Fez, were among the transmitters. It is a case of a tradition surviving its homeland — and a caution against reading the Andalusi legacy in modern Spanish music too directly, since the continuous line runs south, not north.